Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in
the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine
creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of
infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this
phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to
believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental
by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question ...

BYPAULBLOOM

Is God an Accident?

I. GOD IS NOT DEAD

When I was a teenager my rabbi believed that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who

was living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was the Messiah, and that the world was
soon to end. He believed that the earth was a few thousand years old, and that
the fossil record was a consequence of the Great Flood. He could describe the
afterlife, and was able to answer adolescent questions about the fate of Hitler's
soul.
My rabbi was no crackpot; he was an intelligent and amiable man, a teacher
and a scholar. But he held views that struck me as strange, even disturbing.
Like many secular people, I am comfortable with religion as a source of
spirituality and transcendence, tolerance and love, charity and good works. Who
can object to the faith of Martin Luther King Jr. or the Dalai Lama\u2014at least as
long as that faith grounds moral positions one already accepts? I am
uncomfortable, however, with religion when it makes claims about the natural
world, let alone a world beyond nature. It is easy for those of us who reject
supernatural beliefs to agree with Stephen Jay Gould that the best way to
accord dignity and respect to both science and religion is to recognize that they
apply to "non-overlapping magisteria": science gets the realm of facts, religion
the realm of values.

For better or worse, though, religion is much more than a set of ethical
principles or a vague sense of transcendence. The anthropologist Edward Tylor
got it right in 1871, when he noted that the "minimum definition of religion" is a
belief in spiritual beings, in the supernatural. My rabbi's specific claims were a
minority view in the culture in which I was raised, but thosesorts of views\u2014
about the creation of the universe, the end of the world, the fates of souls\u2014
define religion as billions of people understand and practice it.

The United States is a poster child for supernatural belief. Just about everyone
in this country\u201496 percent in one poll\u2014believes in God. Well over half of
Americans believe in miracles, the devil, and angels. Most believe in an afterlife
\u2014and not just in the mushy sense that we will live on in the memories of other
people, or in our good deeds; when asked for details, most Americans say they
believe that after death they will actually reunite with relatives and get to meet
God. Woody Allen once said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my
work. I want to achieve it through not dying." Most Americans have precisely
this expectation.

But America is an anomaly, isn't it? These statistics are sometimes taken as yet
another indication of how much this country differs from, for instance, France
and Germany, where secularism holds greater sway. Americans are
fundamentalists, the claim goes, isolated from the intellectual progress made by
the rest of the world.

There are two things wrong with this conclusion. First, even if a gap between
America and Europe exists, it is not the United States that is idiosyncratic. After
all, the rest of the world\u2014Asia, Africa, the Middle East\u2014is not exactly filled with
hard-core atheists. If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe,
not the United States.

Second, the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller
than we think. The sociologists Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, and Roger
Finke, of Pennsylvania State University, write that the big difference has to do
with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (Building on the
work of the Chicago-based sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley, they argue
that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in
which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their
product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like
many government monopolies, have become inefficient.) Most polls from
European countries show that a majority of their people are believers. Consider
Iceland. To judge by rates of churchgoing, Iceland is the most secular country on
earth, with a pathetic two percent weekly attendance. But four out of five
Icelanders say that they pray, and the same proportion believe in life after
death.

In the United States some liberal scholars posit a different sort of
exceptionalism, arguing that belief in the supernatural is found mostly in
Christian conservatives\u2014those infamously described by the Washington Post
reporter Michael Weisskopf in 1993 as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to
command." Many people saw the 2004 presidential election as pitting
Americans who are religious against those who are not.

An article by Steven Waldman in the online magazineSlate provides some

perspective on the divide:

"As you may already know, one of America's two political parties is extremely
religious. Sixty-one percent of this party's voters say they pray daily or more
often. An astounding 92 percent of them believe in life after death. And there's
a hard-core subgroup in this party of super-religious Christian zealots. Very
conservative on gay marriage, half of the members of this subgroup believe
Bush uses toolitt le religious rhetoric, and 51 percent of them believe God gave
Israel to the Jews and that its existence fulfills the prophecy about the second
coming of Jesus."
The group that Waldman is talking about is Democrats; the hard-core subgroup
is African-American Democrats.

Finally, consider scientists. They are less likely than non-scientists to be
religious\u2014but not by a huge amount. A 1996 poll asked scientists whether they
believed in God, and the pollsters set the bar high\u2014no mealy-mouthed evasions
such as "I believe in the totality of all that exists" or "in what is beautiful and
unknown"; rather, they insisted on a real biblical God, one believers could pray
to and actually get an answer from. About 40 percent of scientists said yes to a
belief in this kind of God\u2014about the same percentage found in a similar poll in
1916. Only when we look at the most elite scientists\u2014members of the National
Academy of Sciences\u2014do we find a strong majority of atheists and agnostics.

These facts are an embarrassment for those who see supernatural beliefs as a
cultural anachronism, soon to be eroded by scientific discoveries and the spread
of cosmopolitan values. They require a new theory of why we are religious\u2014one
that draws on research in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and
developmental psychology.

II. OPIATES AND FRATERNITIES

One traditional approach to the origin of religious belief begins with the

observation that it is difficult to be a person. There is evil all around; everyone
we love will die; and soon we ourselves will die\u2014either slowly and probably
unpleasantly or quickly and probably unpleasantly. For all but a pampered and
lucky few life really is nasty, brutish, and short. And if our lives have some
greater meaning, it is hardly obvious.
So perhaps, as Marx suggested, we have adopted religion as an opiate, to
soothe the pain of existence. As the philosopher Susanne K. Langer has put it,
man "cannot deal with Chaos"; supernatural beliefs solve the problem of this
chaos by providing meaning. We are not mere things; we are lovingly crafted by
God, and serve his purposes. Religion tells us that this is a just world, in which
the good will be rewarded and the evil punished. Most of all, it addresses our
fear of death. Freud summed it all up by describing a "three-fold task" for
religious beliefs: "they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile
men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must
compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in
common has imposed on them."

Religions can sometimes do all these things, and it would be unrealistic to denythat this partly explains their existence. Indeed, sometimes theologians use theforegoing arguments to make a case for why we should believe: if one wishesfor purpose, meaning, and eternal life, there is nowhere to go but toward God.

One problem with this view is that, as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
reminds us, we don't typically get solace from propositions that we don't
already believe to be true. Hungry people don't cheer themselves up by
believing that they just had a large meal. Heaven is a reassuring notion only
insofar as people believe such a place exists; it is this belief that an adequate
theory of religion has to explain in the first place.

Also, the religion-as-opiate theory fits best with the monotheistic religions most
familiar to us. But what about those people (many of the religious people in the
world) who do not believe in an all-wise and just God? Every society believes in
spiritual beings, but they are often stupid or malevolent. Many religions simply
don't deal with metaphysical or teleological questions; gods and ancestor spirits
are called upon only to help cope with such mundane problems as how to
prepare food and what to do with a corpse\u2014not to elucidate the Meaning of It
All. As for the reassurance of heaven, justice, or salvation, again, it exists in
some religions but by no means all. (In fact, even those religions we are most
familiar with are not always reassuring. I know some older Christians who were
made miserable as children by worries about eternal damnation; the prospect of
oblivion would have been far preferable.) So the opiate theory is ultimately an
unsatisfying explanation for the existence of religion.

The major alternative theory is social: religion brings people together, giving
them an edge over those who lack this social glue. Sometimes this argument is
presented in cultural terms, and sometimes it is seen from an evolutionary